


Or Gut His Own

by depressaria



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Community: hc_bingo, Culebra Biology, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, On the Run, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 07:44:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11962878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depressaria/pseuds/depressaria
Summary: But they weren’t talking about it and they didn’t have stable or safe. They had the road, and cheap hotel rooms, and fast food wrappers in the backseat of the car, and blood on Richie’s shirt.After Santánico is freed, Seth and Richie go on the run instead of going their separate ways.





	Or Gut His Own

**Author's Note:**

> For the wild card square on my hc_bingo card. I chose the prompt ‘on the run.’ 
> 
> Warnings: gore/violence, angst over vampiric eating habits, imagery which may evoke self-harm, Geckocest if you squint

_To exorcise that memory_  
_Spread gasoline on closet pyre_  
_On that fire, we will warm our hands_  
_By that light we’ll groom each other_  
_Pull down the shades, unplug the telephone_  
_Let’s disappear  
_

~Ghosts by Lullaby for the Working Class

~*~*~*~

He was standing there in the bar with his neck throbbing and every muscle in his body screaming in protest of everything he put them through that day. Santánico looked like it hadn’t even fully hit her yet that she was free, and Richie looked like he wanted him to go with them and have a weird incestuous snake menage á trois with them. There was blood at the corner of his mouth, and Seth thought it was his.

“Fuck it,” Seth said, and before Richie and Santánico had the time to say El Rey, he shot her in the head, grabbed his asshole traitor brother by the arm, and dragged him out into the sunlight. 

Richie tried to struggle, but the sun was on Seth’s side, so he was dazed and smoking a little by the time Seth crammed him into the backseat of the nearest car. He’d had to deal with enough of Richie’s shit today, and figured Richie could just deal with this. 

Seth caught a glimpse of Santánico in the rearview mirror right before he floored it, stumbling and holding a hand to her head but fucking pissed—for good reason—and looking him right in the eye. She looked so radiant in the sunlight, her bloodied hair whipping in the wind, her perfect face raw and furious, that it was almost enough to make _Seth_ fall in love with her and sell his brother down the river for the chance to drink vodka off her feet for all eternity. 

He felt for her, he really did. And he was happy that she got to be free and all. It was just that he needed Richie more than she did. 

~*~*~*~

He threw his jacket into the backseat to cover Richie’s face from the worst of the sun, then drove until he worried that he might fall asleep at the wheel, then drove a little more until he found a hotel. 

When the sun started going down, Richie started stirring, but he still looked disoriented and he stayed put until Seth finished booking a room and came back to transfer him. 

“This is an abduction,” he said when Seth opened the door. His voice was hoarse and his lips were all dry and cracked like he’d walked all day instead of snoozing in the backseat. Whatever. If he was talking, he was probably fine. He expected him to get a little more toasty than he did, to be totally honest. There was a moment right before he dragged him outside when he thought he might go out in a dramatic puff of dust. It was a good thing he wasn’t as neurotic as him; if it’d been Seth vamped and Richie left holding the bag, he’d probably still be standing in the Titty Twister with a stupid look on his face while evil!Seth and Santánico laughed all the way to the blood bank. Either that or her and evil!Seth would be in a shallow grave, and Richie’d be off playing Grizzly Adams in the woods again, only this time without Seth’s imprisonment or Vanessa’s hovering to sour the canned-food-and-parasite-infested-water melange.

“I rescued you,” Seth said cheerfully. “There’s a difference.”

Either he was less pissed than he claimed to be, or the sun _really_ did a number on him, because he didn’t fight at all as Seth took him up to the room he rented, and even once they got in there all he did was pace. It was slow, meandering pacing, but pacing nonetheless. Seth cracked open the mini-bar, grabbed a beer, kicked back on the couch, and waited for him to start bitching. 

When he finally spoke up, it caught Seth on guard, because he asked, “How’re your shoulder and neck?” His voice sounded a bit better.

“They’re fine,” Seth said. Bandaid on the bullet graze on his shoulder fell off somewhere between the winnebago and his brother becoming a (goddamn shitsucking) vampire, and his neck had only stopped bleeding since they sat down in the motel room, but neither were bothering him half so much as everything else on his mind.

“I can dig out a first aid kit and clean it up for you. Hell of a time for it to get infected.”

His gaze kept flickering to the bite marks on Seth’s neck and the long-dried blood on his sleeve, and Seth’s stomach dropped. “It’s making you hungry, isn’t it?” He asked. When Richie didn’t respond, just stood there glaring at him, he continued, “If you were with her you’d be eating someone right now, wouldn’t you?” He had a sudden vision of the two of them jamming straws onto either side of some poor bastard’s neck and going to town like Betty and Veronica sharing an egg cream and—

Christ, he hoped Kate was okay.

“I still can’t believe you did that, by the way. I was supposed to—“

“Supposed to what, exactly? Ride off into the sunset with her, hand-feed her eyeballs plucked from fresh corpses while she fucks your mouth with her feet? Come on, man.”

His jaw was so tight that Seth thought he might be in real danger of cracking a tooth, not that it wouldn’t just immediately heal itself if that happened. “I would’ve come back to you. It’s just there were things we had to do.”

“You know, I’ve seen your freaky little sketchbook, and I’m willing to bet that those things involved your typical apocalypse fare. Making the streets run with blood, killing all those higher-up vamps your girlfriend seems to hate so much, ruining a lot of people’s lives… So forgive me, Richard, if I don’t feel particularly guilty for pulling you away from whatever creepy plans you and her cooked up while I was losing _my_ damn mind thinking you’d gone all Girl Interrupted on me while I was locked up.”

He laughed incredulously. The motion made his lower lip split, and the little smear of blood stayed there even though Seth knew the cut must have healed before he even started talking. “Is that what you still think?”

“How the fuck else am I supposed to interpret it when you take a dive off the deep end in the middle of the biggest heist of our lives, then miraculously recover the minute we find your imaginary girlfriend?”

“I didn’t go off the deep end.”

“So explain it, prodigy. Explain it all in thirty seconds, no ‘I can’t explain’s or vision handwaves. Thirty seconds, no bullshit, and maybe I’ll believe you.”

For a moment he just glared, not even looking angry but rather like a wall had slammed down behind his eyes, but just when Seth was getting a bit concerned that his ploy hadn’t worked, he sighed deeply. “I got a little messed up when you got locked up. I won a stupid bet with that Carlos guy and the prize was the knife. I started having visions of Santánico telling me to free her. And no, Seth, I did not know what it all really meant, not until it was too late. What I told you in the RV was all I knew. Why would I have to run a scam on you to get to Mexico? It’s not that fucking hard.” He finished by grabbing the beer out of Seth’s hands and taking a long drink. “You happy now?” Then, when Seth scoffed, he added, “Would you have believed me if I told you everything from the start?”

Okay, to be fair to him, he probably wouldn’t have. But to be fair to himself, this crap was way out of anyone’s comfort zone, except apparently Richie’s, and even then the guy had been marinating in his own weird cerebrospinal fluid for so long that he really ought to be grateful Vanessa or Pritchard didn’t have him committed while he was in prison and couldn’t do shit about it. “I sure as hell would have kept you away from that bar, Carlos or no Carlos.”

Richie took another drink and handed the beer back to Seth. “Believe it or not, I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Really? Because I got the impression you were kind of into the idea of being turned into a stripper’s undead slave.”

“How many times am I gonna have to tell you that I didn’t know?” He flopped down into one of the chairs at the kitchenette, scrubbed his hands over his face. The motion looked weird without his glasses; Seth wondered if Santánico had kept them like some fucked up little souvenir. It’s probably what he would have done. “I was dying. You saw where Ranger Rick shot me. And I couldn’t leave you like that, okay?” 

That’s what made Seth relax, finally. 

“Okay,” he said. “I get it. I was right the second time, right? She played you.”

“Sure,” Richie said, with neither true sincerity nor sarcasm.

It was enough for the moment. It had to be.

~*~*~*~

They spent every night driving until dawn, then booking a motel room during the day. Neither were sure that daylight kept them exactly safe, but seeing as Richie wasn’t going to be working on a tan any time soon, they couldn’t travel by day anyways, so for his own sanity he figured that daylight was as good a deterrent as any. 

As long as they kept moving, he felt pretty good about life, all things considered. It wasn’t paradise, but he had Richie and he had a vehicle and as long he was in motion things seemed normal. They could be on a perfectly normal road trip, if it weren’t for the fact that they were on the run and his brother was quite literally a monster.

The last part was weird. Richie was almost the same as he always was, not like a reanimated corpse or anything. None of that Twilight crap either, thank christ for that. He breathed. His heart still beat. His skin felt like skin, just colder than it was supposed to be. He slept and showered. Sometimes when they were driving along a long empty stretch of road and they were talking, things seemed normal, like he was still just his asshole brother who played with knives too much and occasionally turned his head to look at things that no one else could see, who used to put a candle in a little square of convenience store carrot cake every year for Seth’s birthday. ( _”Come on, buddy,” Seth would say, looking at the crappy, slightly squashed-looking piece of cake that was still marked with deep grooves from the cling wrap it spent its life in, that was fifty percent corn syrup and forty-five percent wax from the candle on it, which always seemed to melt with a preternatural swiftness. “This is just sad. Apply yourself.”_

 _He’d say, bending towards the candle, “I will when you do,” and Seth would blow out the candle before he could use it to light his cigarette like the massive douchebag he was._ )

Seth thought even Richie forgot sometimes. On one sunset, they passed a little place that sold horchata, and Richie didn’t even have to stare pointedly/longingly for five seconds at the sign before Seth pulled over and bought him some. He got this tiny dorky smile on his face when he took the first sip, but he didn’t get half of the stuff down before Seth had to pull over again and let him puke it up. 

“Well, that’s fucked,” Seth said when he got back in the car, wiping his mouth. “Didn’t know the ‘don’t drink the water’ thing extended to aquas frescas.”

The look Richie gave him shut him right up for the rest of the night. He kept casting what he hoped were subtle concerned glances at Richie, but the guy just sat there picking at his lips, which were chapped again, and watching the passing landscape like someone was forcing him at gunpoint to watch a tape of his parents conceiving him. 

Seth drank the rest of the horchata.

~*~*~*~

Richie got more and more sluggish as the days passed. First it was just stuff like listlessness and not paying attention to Seth, which he did anyways when he was mad at him and sometimes even when he wasn’t. Then he just started getting weird. He made Seth stop the car at midnight so he could stagger out into the ditch and stare at an upturned bottle of Coke that was full of ants. It took Seth forever to herd him back into the car, and they almost didn’t make it to a motel before sunup. 

The day after that, he took the wheel from Seth (which he figured he should probably stop being so surprised about) and damn near drove the car into a ditch so that he could wander out into the field beyond it and… look at something, Seth figured, but what he had no clue. 

He was starting to feel a little panicky, actually. He didn’t think this far ahead. His master plan basically ended after obtaining his brother. Richie hadn’t gone all… reptilian since Seth stole him back from Santánico, so he hadn’t really had much time to contemplate that little inconvenience, much less the intricacies of ethical consumption under his new diet. And their relationship was so fragile that he knew Richie wasn’t going to make a move until he did. 

Richie’d always been particular about his food (if the picky little shit had never gotten spit in his food, Seth would tie a bow around him and personally hand him back to Santánico) but at the moment he really wished it was as easy as discreetly wiping all the mustard off of a burger and rewrapping it before giving it to him. 

Seth resolved to do something after one particularly bad night where Richie tried and failed to buckle his seatbelt, then spent the whole night writing something onto an old takeout bag. It might not have been a very smart something, but he couldn’t sit on his ass any longer. 

Their next motel room was on the second floor, and Richie took the stairs like an arthritic eighty year old, and was still a little breathless when he finally made it through the door. It seemed to be all he could do to shut the door behind him and collapse onto the couch, legs sprawled out like those of an asshole college student on a bus who thinks his junk needed more room than everyone else’s. Seth was sitting at the table in the kitchenette, playing with a knife. It wasn’t _the_ knife, and he wasn’t as good as knife games as Richie was, but he was still pretty damn good. Richie was watching with palpably intent irritation, like he could make Seth stop being obnoxious through sheer force of will. His jaw tightened every time Seth almost stabbed himself. 

“What?” he asked finally. 

“What?” Seth asked back. For someone who never really had the chance to be a stereotypically douchey older brother as a kid, he wasn’t half bad at being annoying as shit. 

“You’re very pointedly stabbing that table and I’d just like to know what exactly it is you want from me before you fuck up and slice off one of your fingers.” 

Seth made a show of pondering their situation, then said, “You’d kind of be into that, though, right?” 

Richie scowled, but the faces he made when he was pissed never really did intimidate Seth. 

Still holding the knife, he strolled across the room and sat next to him on the couch, real close, so close that he’d have to get up to avoid touching him, and he knew he didn’t have the damn energy at the moment. “You need blood, right? Well, buddy, you're not killing anybody else on my watch, so I guess you're gonna have to hit up Los Hermanos Geckos' Mobile Blood Bank. Currently, and unfortunately, run by only one hermano, but hey, take what you can get, right?" 

“I don’t want your blood,” Richie said through gritted teeth. “It’s weird and you taste like crap. You’re just trying to get me to accept so I’ll sound like an asshole.” His eyes were the color they were supposed to be, but his pupils were slits, and Seth could tell it was taking everything he had to keep his dorky new fangs from coming out. 

“Sure you do. I know for a fact you were running on fumes when we got through the labyrinth, and all you’ve had since then is a mouthful of me. You’re starving to death, brother.”

He was breathing hard through his nose, glaring daggers. Seth tilted his head a little, baring the side of his neck where Richie’s fangmarks from that night were old but still red and a bit scabby and, in his humble opinion, pretty damn prime vampire bait. When Richie still didn’t make a move, he shrugged and got up. “You can bring a horse to water, I guess. The man who can’t gut his own food, right?” 

As he moved to walk away, Richie’s hand darted out and grabbed his sleeve. He was looking up at him with murder in his eyes, which always warmed Seth’s heart a bit. It was one of the few benefits of being an older sibling, the ability to piss him off this much, and he got to reap so precious few of those benefits, circumstances being what circumstances were. 

“All right,” Seth said, starting to drag the knife across his palm. “So here’s the deal. You take just enough blood from me to keep yourself alive. No more, no less. You don’t go stealing anyone else’s blood, you don’t _kill_ anyone. That’s all you gotta do. Stop murdering people. Think you can handle that?”

Richie was unblinkingly watching the line of red bloom across Seth’s palm, eyes half-lidded, and he didn’t look up until Seth put the knife on the arm of the couch and snapped the fingers of his uninjured hand in his face.

“Richard. Focus here. Can you do that?” 

Slowly, like someone was physically trying to hold him still and stop him from completing the motion, Richie nodded. 

Seth gave him his hand. 

It was creepy as hell, actually. Left him feeling more than a little sleazy, wondering if this was the vampire equivalent of a lap dance—Richie was sitting on the suite’s lumpy sofa and Seth was standing in front of him, practically in his lap, and it… was probably better not to think too hard about it. 

He’d carefully planned out how long to let Richie drink, but in the end Richie was the one to shove him away, face carefully neutral, jaw tight. 

“You know we can’t keep this up,” Richie said. 

“Speak for yourself,” Seth replied. “Personally, I feel great.”

~*~*~*~

He felt great for the first couple of weeks, anyways.

Between the daily blood-letting, the culebras and cops on their tail, and the fact that his brother was a monster, it didn’t take long for him to start feeling some wear and tear. 

Richie looked better, of course, but he also looked at Seth like he was expecting him to pull a stake on him and/or keel over any day now, which he didn’t appreciate one bit. But when he asked if he had something to say, he acted like he wasn’t even looking, like the avoidant piece of shit that he was. At least Seth’s meaningful looks were, even to the least perceptive stranger, chock full of emotion and understanding. If he hadn’t lived with Richie their whole lives, his meaningful looks would just look like he was consumed by thoughts of what color Seth’s spleen was. Maybe that’s what Santánico had seemed to like him so much. 

He told himself that they were free, they were together, and Richie wasn’t killing people, so nothing else really mattered. It didn’t matter that Seth was starting to look and feel like patient zero in a horror film about vampires invading a small town, or that they hadn’t talked about much of anything lately, let alone their current arrangement. 

What mattered was that it was serving its purpose, and that they didn’t talk about it.

~*~*~*~

They still didn’t talk about it even when Seth passed out—it was _not_ fainting—in the parking lot of a motel while getting out of the car. 

He was only out for a few seconds, but he still woke up to Richie staring at him reproachfully, the I-told-you-so expression of someone biting back a lot of ugly thoughts about the situation at hand. 

“By all means,” he grumbled as he used the car to lever himself up while Richie watched with unwavering (and, creepily, unblinking) reproach. “Don’t keep anything bottled up. Stress is what’ll kill you.” 

“You’re not stupid,” Richie said. “You don’t need me to spell it out for you.”

He stopped arguing when Richie claimed not to be hungry.

~*~*~*~

He dragged himself out of bed one day to find Richie asleep sitting up on the couch, an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. 

_You take after your father,_ Uncle Eddie had said when the two of them first got sent to him, the both of them still stinking of the smoke, Richie still smelling faintly of lighter fluid, not that Seth figured out that particular detail until extremely recently. Richie had seemed utterly unaffected, but it had made Seth feel sick, almost as sick as he’d felt when he realized that the breakfast-food smell in the burning house was actually… yeah. 

Because Richie didn’t _look_ like Dad, was the thing. 

He reached out and took the cigarette out of Richie’s mouth. It was all shredded on the end that was in his mouth. “Richard,” he said. “It’s dusk. Time to get up.” 

He didn’t wake up and Seth patted his face; the motion came out harder than he meant it to, more like a slap, but he didn’t react. 

“Richie, man, wake up.” He slapped him again, on purpose this time, and though his head fell onto his shoulder he still didn’t wake up. 

Could vampires die by something other than a stake? Because if they could, he looked like he had one foot in the grave already. White as a sheet, dark circles under his eyes like he’d just gotten home from a My Chemical Romance concert. Not that Seth was looking real pretty himself, lately, but Jesus. 

They hadn’t seen any of their pursuers in a long time, but that just filled him with more anxious energy; they were due for an encounter, and the longer they stopped, the more likely it was that something would go really wrong. And, well, when shit went wrong for them, it got really bad really fast. Extremely recent case in point: Abilene. 

In the absence of any other evident solutions, Seth grabbed a knife, reopened the most recent cut on his palm, and started dripping blood into Richie’s mouth.

Richie woke up spluttering. “What the fuck?” he asked hoarsely. Reflexively, he was wiping at his mouth, scrambling into a more upright position, but his frenetic movements stopped when he looked down and saw his hand smeared in blood. His eyes looked all wrong. They weren’t just groggy and unfocused, but almost blurred and jittery, like the color was trying to shiver into yellow, the pupil trying to contract to a slit, but there wasn’t enough energy in him for the change to happen. 

“It was the only thing I could think of,” Seth said. “You were—you wouldn’t wake up.”

“You have the red cell count of a hemophiliac with a fear of needles, and you’re in here cutting yourself to wake people up instead of trying cold water?”

Which, when he put it that way, made Seth feel like an idiot, but he was fairly sure that that wouldn’t have worked anyways. “Don’t waste it, then,” he said. 

Richie looked furious, but he started licking the blood off his hand anyways. His eyes, seemingly against his will, slid over to Seth’s hand, which was still bleeding sluggishly, one thin rivulet slowly making its way to his elbow. 

Seth held out his hand. Richie latched on, started at the elbow, and followed that rivulet up to the cut on Seth’s palm. It was still fucking creepy, especially when it took a visible effort for him to pull himself away and press a pad of gauze to the cut before it could start oozing again.

“We can’t keep this up,” he said. “It’s killing you.”

“It’s killing you, too.”

“Look, we don’t even know if I _can_ die like that. I say the next time that happens, you throw me in the trunk and keep going.” Because that wouldn’t be conspicuous at all. He was pressing the gauze too fucking hard.

Seth bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from saying something he’d regret. There was no time to argue, and nothing really left to say, anyways. “Do you want to drive, or should I?”

Richie shrugged.

What the fuck ever, then, he’d drive. Problem fucking solved. Richie couldn’t drive for shit even under normal circumstances.

Seth pulled back his hand, leaving Richie holding the bloodied gauze. He pretended not to notice that, as he turned away and started packing their shit up, Richie brought the gauze to his mouth. 

~*~*~*~

The next morning was cool and cloudy and they got a hotel room before the sun fully rose, but the brief walk from car to room set Richie’s skin to sizzling slightly.

He steadfastly avoided Seth’s gaze.

~*~*~*~

One night, Seth fell asleep while Richie was driving, and when he woke up, it was 4:00 am and the car was pulled over on the side of the road. Blinker on, for some unknown reason; it was ticking and it was impossibly annoying. The driver’s seat was empty; the jolt of panic that shot through him at the sight _really_ woke him up, even though it was humid in the car from the open door and it made him want to go back to sleep. He pulled out his gun as he stumbled out of the car, vision going hazy and dark for a few seconds when he first stood, but he didn’t take two steps away from the car before he found him. 

He was on his knees and hunched over something, his back to Seth. As Seth approached, his stomach dropped. Some selfish animal part of his brain was screaming at him to get back in the damn car and leave him there, to get the hell away from all this shit, but he ignored it.

“Richie,” he said. His voice was all rough with sleep still. “Richie, man. What are you doing?”

When he turned, Seth could see the decimated remains of what was once a dead coyote. There was a dead buzzard a few feet away and its feathers were fucking everywhere. Richie was chewing on a mouthful of the coyote’s leg, fur and all, the nearly bare bone in his hands, and what was left on the bone was so rotten that Seth couldn’t imagine anything but a buzzard might want it.

“Jesus, Richie.” It wasn’t a good idea with the anemia (thanks for that, Richard) but a drink would have been so fucking welcome. The blood was one thing, but this… 

He thought of the meat grinders beneath the Titty Twister and felt sick. He actually pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. 

“I had to,” Richie said, eyes wide and embarrassed like Seth had caught him jerking off instead of eating roadkill. “I had to. I was diving it and it—it smelled so good, Seth, I can’t explain it, like Vanessa’s perfume and fresh horchata and the best burger you've ever had and going down on someone for the first time, all at once. And I'm so…" 

( _The man who cannot build his own shelter or gut his own food…_ )

Hs hands were visibly shaking and he was clutching the coyote’s gross old femur like Seth was going to take it from him. 

“Richie,” Seth said, trying to make it come out less horrified than he felt. “Richie, man, it’s gonna be fine. You’re fine. Just go get in the car so we can get a room before the sun comes up.”

“Let me finish first?”

Hesitant as he was to call a rotting coyote and half a vulture food, Richie did look better—physically, at least—with some food in him. Why did it never occur to him that Richie might need more than blood? But his eyes were still wrong. He was clutching the leg and looking up at him with the most awful expression, half-like Seth caught him doing something dirty and half like it was the most natural and logical thing in the world. Like Seth was a little dense for not understanding. A fly landed on his cheek and he didn’t even blink. 

“I wish I could, but we’ve got to go. The sun’ll come up and you’ll be toast.” Quite literally. He took the last few steps towards Richie and touched his shoulder before he could open his mouth to reply. “Come on, up you go.” 

Richie let him pull him to his feet, but instead of walking back to the car he sort of folded up against Seth’s chest. It must have looked stupid, with how much taller he was and with the dead coyote and the buzzard feathers blowing around like a pillow fight gone very very wrong, but he put his ams around him because, well. What are you going to do? There was no one around to see it, anyways. It felt weird, hugging to comfort Richie instead of hugging to comfort himself. 

“I’m just so fucking hungry,” Richie said into Seth’s shoulder. “All the time.” 

“I know.” He was petting his hair and the back of his neck but it felt like such a pointless gesture because the coyote leg was somehow warm and he could feel the blood and spit and venom on it dampening his shirt, and how was he even supposed to deal with this?

“You don’t.” The fingers of Richie’s free hand were digging painfully hard into Seth’s side. “You don’t know and I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“Get in the car,” Seth repeated. “We’ll figure something out, okay?” 

When Richie nodded and straightened, Seth pulled the leg out of his grasp as delicately as he could. 

Before he turned to toss the leg back onto what was left on the carcass, he saw Richie licking the blood off his hand as he shuffled to the car.

~*~*~*~

Every time Seth felt a little better, Richie looked a bit worse. Whenever Richie started to look better, Seth felt like he’d been hit by a train.

They fell into a rhythm, learned to keep things in balance so that they both felt sort of sick but were also both mostly functional. If he saw big roadkill, he stopped, turned up the radio, and determinedly looked at the map while Richie went to town on it. If they passed by a pharmacy, he plundered the supplement shelf while Richie distracted the cashier. 

Seth was almost relieved when, one week in October, a couple of rangers spotted them in a convenience store. They knocked out the cashier and one of the rangers, and Richie looked like it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. 

Except when he’d figured the guy had donated enough to the cause and he went to pull Richie off of him, he found himself flat on his back, pinned in place by Richie’s weight, Richie’s face perilously close to his jugular. There was a moment when he thought it was over and he just froze up, staring into Richie’s blank eyes, his monstrous face. His fangs were actually drooling venom and it was dripping onto so copiously onto the base of Seth’s throat that if he had any open wounds he might be worried that he’d survive this only to turn into a monster, himself. 

Richie leaned in, and it suddenly occurred to Seth that if someone were to walk in it’d look like they were necking, and that was what finally spurred him to action. He kneed Richie in the balls so hard that he’d feel bad about it if Richie hadn’t been about to drain him, and scrambled away until his back was pressed against a stack of boxes of off-brand soda. 

He didn’t even know what to say, so while Richie worked his way through every swear word known to man, Seth heaved himself to his feet and went to check on the ranger. The guy’s pulse was thready, but he’d make it if help showed up soon, so Seth dialed 911 from cashier’s phone and then forced himself to turn back to Richie. 

“Time to go,” he told him. His voice didn’t come out nearly as casual as he’d wanted it to. 

Richie’s face was back to normal when he looked up at Seth, but there was still something dead and hungry behind his eyes as he got to his feet and followed Seth back to the car. 

“Do we need to talk about this?” Seth asked once they were back on the road. “Is this going to be a regular occurrence?” Because he could put up with a lot for family—had been putting up with a hell of a lot since Abilene. He just needed to know beforehand what he was in for. 

“I just got caught up,” Richie said. He wasn’t even looking at Seth, just ineffectually mopping blood off of his hands and shirt with a handful of dingy napkins foraged from the graveyard of fast food bags in the backseat. 

“Caught up? Jesus Christ, Richard.” 

“It won’t happen again.”

“Oh, okay, that makes me feel so much better, considering it never should have happened in the first place. What’s going on with you?”

When Richie just kept dabbing at the blood drying on his shirt, Seth snatched the napkins out of his hand, and they both lapsed into agitated silence. 

“I think you’ve been kidding yourself about this,” Richie said when they pulled into the motel’s parking lot. “You’ve been acting like this will go away if we just run far enough, like one day everything will go back to the way it was and we can start robbing banks again and you can go crawling back to Vanessa again. It doesn’t matter how anyone feels about it. I’m stuck like this.” 

“There’s always a way out. When the heat dies down, we can—”

“We can’t. There’s nothing we can do, Seth. You need to let that go.” 

Seth’s heart was in his throat and he was gripping the steering wheel so hard he could hear it creak in protest, and he just wanted to calm the fuck down and figure out what words he needed to say to shut Richie up, but his brain was full of static and blood. 

All that came out was, “Like you let what Dad did go?”

Richie’s face went defensively blank, and Seth got out of the car before he could reply. 

~*~*~*~

He had a dream about his nineteenth birthday. At first it was mundane and true-to-memory, except for the fact that he had a black eye and one of his fingers was broken. And except for the fact that, this time, after he blew out the candle on the little squashed square of convenience store carrot cake that Richie got for him, Richie smiled beatifically and pulled out a knife instead of a bottle of Wild Turkey.

He opened the door and brought in Dad, who was dripping in lighter fluid. Before he could stand up or even ask what was going on, Richie lifted up the knife and slit Dad’s throat. There was a weird delay between the moment of the motion and the start of the blood coming out, and when Dad did start bleeding it all seemed to come out in slow motion, like the laws of nature decided to throw everything out the window just to make sure Seth didn’t miss a detail of the moment.

Richie closed his eyes at the blood hit his face, first speckling then drenching his skin. His lips were slightly parted and the overall effect was one of utter euphoria, of rapture, like he’d waited his whole freaky life to be the star of a blood-and-lighter-fluid bukkake video. Dad was choking soundlessly and pressing his hands to his throat like he could somehow stop the bleeding, and Richie’s eyelids didn’t so much as flutter even as fat droplets of blood splattered heavily onto his glasses. Seth could somehow hear the cheap plastic frames creak underneath the barrage. The blood pooled rapidly on the surface of the lenses and then started running down the temples, trickling down his neck and under the collar of his shirt; for some reason the idea of the blood getting under his clothes felt final and sickening. 

Seth wanted to go push them apart, go help Dad or wipe the blood or expression off of Richie’s face, or anything, but he couldn’t move out of his chair and when he opened his mouth to speak nothing came out.

He woke up sweaty and breathless, his heart trying to pound its way out of his chest. The situation was not improved when he rolled over onto his side to try and go back to sleep and was greeted by Richie’s sleeping, eerily still face, so close to his own that when he was on his back Richie had probably been breathing into his ear like the creep that he was. 

“What the hell?” he said. The only sounds in the room were the hum of the heater and the faint, tinny sounds of the TV in the other room, and his voice sounded too loud in the dark and quiet. He figured he had the right. For the whole shitty road trip, the two of them had had an arrangement for scenarios when only one bed was available. Seth, as the wronged party, got the bed. Richie, as a literal snake in the grass who probably didn’t even need that much sleep anymore, got the couch. 

He was on top of the covers, but still. Rude. 

“Richie, what the fuck,” Seth said, shoving his shoulder this time. 

“It’s cold,” Richie said without opening his eyes. 

“Yeah, it is. That’s why you’ve got a blanket on the couch where you belong. Come on, get up. Like hell I’m spooning with a guy who’s part rattlesnake.”

“Whatever, man, it’s cold.”

And that, apparently, was that. He couldn’t move him no matter how hard he shoved (which to be fair to himself wasn’t very hard, because he was just barely awake) and Richie didn’t respond again no matter how many times he threatened to clean the toilet with his toothbrush or take a dump in his duffel bag. 

He went back to sleep, but he was so annoyed that he didn’t get much rest anyways, and he spent the whole rest of the day—or night, whatever—giving him the silent treatment. Which, he would admit, was a terrible idea, seeing as the silent treatment never much bothered Richie. Truth be told, he sometimes thought the guy was happiest when he was getting the cold shoulder. He was such an asshole.

~*~*~*~

What he thought would be a one-time annoyance turned into a routine. Sometime during the day, Richie would migrate to Seth’s bed from wherever he’d bedded down for the night, be it the floor or the couch or the other bed. He thought he should probably be slightly concerned by how quickly he’d gotten used to it, but it was so fucking far from the weirdest thing he’d had to deal with lately that he found it hard to give a fuck. 

It was still annoying, but in an almost normal way. Except for the fact that instead of being annoying because Richie was a blanket hog (though he was) or because he kicked in his sleep (he used to when they were kids, but either he’d grown out of it or culebras didn’t move in their sleep) or because he snored (neither of them did), it was annoying because it was like sleeping with a particularly clingy block of ice. 

He woke up around 1:00 pm one day, cold and pissed off and weirded out. A bleary inspection of his surroundings revealed that he was cold and pissed off because his asshole of a brother had decided to worm his way under the blankets instead of politely sleeping over them, and had then stolen said blankets. He couldn’t even pull them back because the guy had himself wrapped up in them like a comedically oversized burrito.

Irritably, he shoved at Richie’s shoulder. “Richard, if I have to be awake right now, so do you.” 

It was like the time on the couch, though; he didn’t stir. He slapped his face, to no effect. This time he was freezing, very nearly room temperature. Was he fucking dead? That’d be just Seth’s luck. They go through hell together for months only for Richie to kick the bucket in his sleep like a geriatric. Christ. He checked his pulse, and for a moment his own sped up because he couldn’t feel anything, but his heart was beating after all, just very slowly, and when he made himself chill out and _look_ , he could see that Richie was still breathing, too, equally slowly.

Did snakes—?

“Please tell me you are not _hibernating_.” He said it louder than he needed to, but wasn’t surprised to see that Richie still didn’t react at all. 

It was a struggle to pull the shitty motel blankets off of him; he’d somehow managed to make a weird tangled nest of them, and his weight was keeping the whole cocoon pinned together. He didn’t even twitch when Seth finally managed to peel away the blankets.

Fuck.

He grabbed Richie by the shoulder and pulled him out of bed, and hitting the cold floor seemed to startle him awake. Well, not really awake, but hopefully alert enough that he could convince him to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

“Seth,” he said groggily. His eyelids were so heavy that his eyes barely qualified as open. “What are you doing?”

“It’s time to get up, buddy.”

“No, man, it’s cold.” He started reaching for the blankets that Seth had tossed aside after divesting him of them, and Seth stepped on his hand to stop him.

“I know it’s cold, but do you really want your girlfriend’s little friends to catch you while you’re hibernating or… whatever it is you’re doing?”

“They’ll be sleeping too,” he said, and started making himself comfortable against the end of the mattress, blanket or no blanket. Granted, his neck was craned at an awkward angle and when you combined that with the fact that Seth was resting most of his weight against his metacarpals, it sort of looked incredibly uncomfortable, but he seemed happy enough with the position because he closed his eyes again.

“No, because we’ve got normal people after us too, remember?”

Richie didn’t open his eyes, but he did frown a little.

“You can sleep in the car if you want,” Seth told him, even as he dug his heel hard into the back of his hand to keep him awake. 

At that, Richie heaved a deep sigh and pushed himself upright, grabbing one of the blankets as he did so and wrapping it about his shoulders like the world’s ugliest cloak. When they got down to the car, he just sort of flopped onto his side into the backseat. Rangers might take them in on seatbelt law violations or stealing from motels, in the end.

“We need to get you one of those cardboard crowns from Kahuna Burger,” Seth told him. “Then you’ll look like king of the shitty hotels.” Which really was as close to El Rey as he expected either of them were ever going to get from there on out. The corner of Richie’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t say anything, just hummed noncommitally. 

He didn’t go back to sleep, though Seth worried about how it would look if he did and he ended up with what appeared to be a recently dead guy and a stolen motel comforter in the backseat of his car. He could tell Richie was awake because he glanced back at him at every stoplight, and his eyes always reflected the artificial light wrong, like when you shine a flashlight over a dark expanse of swamp and watch the gloom light up with countless pairs of animal eyes.

At the nearest opportunity, he stopped to pick up warmer clothes for Richie and a coffee that he suspected was heated to third degree burn-inducing levels. Richie put on both the hoodies Seth bought ("you know, one of those was supposed to be for me. now you're an asshole who looks like an asshole, congratulations.”), right there in the car, but of course didn’t drink the coffee, just sort of sat there holding it. It was kind of sad, but he seemed revived enough by it to clamber into the front passenger seat, so he tried not to think about it too hard.

“Cotton kills,” Richie said, after the coffee had cooled down and he’d abandoned it in the cup holder. Seth’s elbow kept bumping into it every time he moved and he wanted the stupid thing out of his way, but littering always felt like crossing the line, even if all he did was dump the coffee out the window so he could toss the empty cup into the backseat.

“What?”

“It’s one of the first rules of survival. Cotton kills. When it gets wet it stops insulating you and you freeze to death. You’d live longer naked than wearing cotton. Wool’s better.”

“Okay, well, seeing as we’re not planning on hiking through a snowstorm any time soon, I’d say you’re fine.”

“It’s important to know.”

“Well, uh, duly noted.” Not that he really felt he should be taking survival advice from a guy whose idea of self-reliance involved growing a beard, eating vermin, and shitting in the woods, but Richie seemed to be in a good mood despite the hibernation interruptus and Seth wasn’t going to be the one to wreck it, at least not tonight. 

Richie looked out the window for awhile, frowning slightly, then said, “When you were in jail I’d find whole nests of them packed up together like plates of scaly spaghetti.”

“ _What_?”

“That’s what they do, Seth. The snakes. When it’s cold.”

“So you think if we poke around enough we’ll start finding little dens full of culebras?” 

“I don’t know. It’s not like she had time to tell me all this. But if they feel anything like I feel, that’s where they want to be right now.”

So if they were lucky—and typically, they weren’t, but anything was possible—they wouldn’t have to worry about culebras so much until the weather changed again. And it was the holidays, so the normal people would probably all be slacking off.

As far as revelations about supernatural creatures went, it wasn’t the worst.

~*~*~*~

On Christmas Eve, a couple caught up with them. They’d stopped at a convenience store to grab some food for the road, and when Seth stepped out one of them grabbed him by the neck and slammed him into the window. The guy started squeezing and he couldn’t get any leverage to kick him off and he heard gunshots and—

—and then his face was splattered with an awful mixture of blood and brain matter.

The guy wasn’t dusted, just dazed, but it gave Seth time to scramble away, trying to wipe his face off and get air and figure out what was going on all at once. He got his bearings just in time to see Richie, who was holding a gun in his right hand because his left was pinned by a stake to the hood of the car, pull the stake out of his hand and dust the bullet-riddled vampire he’d apparently been grappling with. By the time Seth pushed himself to his feet, Richie had already crossed the short distance from the car to him and staked the one who’d attacked Seth before he could recover from the bullet wound. 

It almost didn’t even register that it had happened until they were both safely in the car. If it weren’t for the fact that Seth’s throat was killing him and he could feel blood drying on his face, it would be all too easy to pretend it never happened.

That possibility skittered even further out of reach when he glanced over at Richie and saw that he was still clutching the wrist of his injured hand, which was bleeding at a stable but still frankly alarming rate.

“Why isn’t your hand healing?” His voice came out thin and hoarse and he knew he should be watching the road because a crash was the absolute last thing they needed, but he kept casting these panicked, involuntary glances over at Richie. Road, Richie’s hand. Road, Richie’s blood-soaked shirt. Road, the upholstery Richie’s hand was about to ruin. Road, the little splatter of blood across Richie’s face that would be all over his glasses if he still wore them. 

“How should I know?” His pupils were blown so wide that, in the gloom, his eyes looked black. “Maybe there was something on the stake.”

Shit. He’d say it out loud, but talking hurt, and that always scared the shit out of him even at the best of times.

He wanted to drive a little further, just to be sure they weren’t being tailed, but Richie was starting to look shocky and he wasn’t in tip-top shape at the moment himself, and sunrise wasn’t far behind anyways, so he ended up stopping at a motel after driving for just an hour. He wiped off his face, left Richie in the car, pulled on a scarf he had shoved in the glovebox, and told the receptionist that he was getting over laryngitis and his friend (“waiting in the car, sick as a dog”) had the flu. 

She was so sympathetic to their supposed plight of being sick and on the road on Christmas that she gave them a discount on the room and didn’t even notice the blood on his clothes.

He wrapped Richie’s hand in a t-shirt to keep from leaving a blood trail to their room, then flipped on the TV and herded him into the bathroom. 

Under the fluorescent lighting, his hand looked worse than he’d thought it would. It was inflamed beneath the blood, redness spreading from the edge of the wound into the surrounding uninjured tissue like it was infected or something, except it was barely an hour ago and there was no way an infection would set in that fast. He was hoping it was just inflammation due to the fact that there was an orgy of splinters and not a burgeoning infection due to the possibility of there being something creepy on the stake. Splinters he could deal with. Vampire poison, not so much. 

“Might be in here awhile, buddy,” he said. Shockingly, talking didn’t become any less painful than it was an hour before. 

“Just get it over with.”

Picking out the splinters was… significantly worse than he thought it would be. It felt like he’d been at it for hours and he was stating to get the kind of nervous headache/nausea combo that you get when you have to focus too long on really delicate work, like being stuck on a school assignment and sitting there with the words swimming together on the page and the faint scent of paper and pencil becoming overpowering and his stomach slowly turning inside out because he had to see it through to the end and there was no way to see it through and no way to escape and no end in sight. Broken pencil without a sharpener feeling. Needle in a haystack feeling, or maybe antidote in a stack of poison needles feeling. 

He kind of wanted to hurl, actually. 

A couple of times, Richie told him that he could take it from there if he needed to stop, but Seth would just feel sicker if he couldn’t finish, and Richie was left-handed anyways. Always had to be the most special snowflake.

By the time he’d gotten rid of all the visible splinters of wood, the sink looked like a crime scene (it’s a figure of speech!) and his hands were visibly shaking. Richie didn’t look much better than Seth felt, but he graciously didn’t say anything as he rinsed the wound under the tap—not that he _could_ say anything, with how hard he was biting his cheek as the water hit his hand—though he did inhale sharply and clutch the edge of the counter hard when, to finish things up, Seth poured whiskey over the injury. Or through it, as it were. At least he wasn’t having to try and sterilize it with a lukewarm strawberry daiquiri. Richie would probably never fully forgive him for that weekend in New Orleans, and he didn’t really blame him.

Wrapping it up was easier. His hands were steady enough to do that still; if Richie tried to do it one-handed, he’d end up doing it too tight. He always did.

Once it was done, Seth took a deep breath and leaned against the counter, head pounding and throat aching more than ever.

Richie thanked him and squeezed past him into the suite, which wasn’t as dismissive as it looked/sounded. The guy had no idea how to do concern like a well-adjusted human being, and they both knew it’d just be worse if he tried. Seth would feel worse even if someone who was good with feelings tried.

He shut the door behind Richie and sat down hard in front of the toilet. There was nothing in his stomach to throw up, and his fear of what dry heaves would do to his throat far overpowered the nausea, but for a few moments the world passed by in blurry waves as he sat there with the porcelain slowly warming under his hands and his mouth filling up with spit and his jaw trembling in that bullshit flaky way it trembled when his body wanted to remind him that vomiting was a thing that could happen at any time, but didn’t actually feel like going through with it.

It was one God damned thing after the other, wasn’t it? If he could just have a week where he didn’t have to worry about someone trying to kill him, one week without another crisis getting added on top of the pile of crises he already had to deal with, he could be a pretty damn well-adjusted human being. As it was, he was holding it together for two while dealing with a lifetime’s worth of thoroughly battered baggage and five years’ worth of ominously unopened suitcases of baggage that he’d been pretty much agonizing over and that Richie didn’t seem to give two shits about. He felt sicker thinking about Vanessa’s shrink friend getting to Richie than he did thinking about, you know, the five years of his life that he wasn’t getting back. Maybe he was the one who needed a shrink.

Christ.

Eventually he was composed enough to leave the bathroom. When he exited, he found that there was a bucket of ice on the kitchenette table, with a few bottles of water and soda buried in the cubes, along with an assortment of vending machine snack foods. All the slightly stale comforts of every motel in North America, plus, weirdly, a bottle of cold medicine and a box of chamomile tea. 

“Receptionist in the lobby said she hopes we feel better soon,” Richie said when Seth rattled the box of tea. He’d changed out of his bloodied clothes at some point, and sitting on the edge of one of the beds in the suite, looked exceptionally normal, if slightly sweaty and pale. Which just added credence to what Seth had told the receptionist, he guessed. “She said it looked like you’d need those.”

He hadn’t even heard him leave to go to the lobby. “Nice lady,” he said. He fished a bottle of water out of the ice bucket and opened it with hands that were starting to become clumsy and uncooperative in response to all the crap he put them through.

“I told her I sprained my wrist, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Richie said. “She wasn’t suspicious.”

Well, he hadn’t been worried about that until Richie brought it up, but that was fine. Hopefully the overly helpful receptionist didn’t come tromping up to their room wth some NSAIDs and a wrist brace next. 

Seth flopped down on the bed across from the one Richie had claimed and took a sip of the chilled water, which felt, blessedly, like chugging a topical anesthetic. Truly a Christmas miracle. “How’s the hand, anyways?” he asked.

Richie shrugged.

“What’s on the TV?” Seth tried.

“News and crappy Christmas movies.” 

He tossed Seth the remote with his good hand, and Seth half-heartedly scrolled through the channels like the situation could have changed in the last five minutes. There were record lows all across North America, and a blizzard in California. 

At some point, Richie migrated over to Seth’s bed. He took the remote from him like that’d been why he went over in the first place, but he stayed sitting on the edge of it even once the remote was in his good hand. 

By the time they’d been watching infomercials for an hour, Richie had fallen asleep sitting up with his neck craned awkwardly against the headboard. He was a breath away from having his head pillowed on Seth’s shoulder, and a few hours’ worth of gravity away from sliding right off the bed and onto the floor, and it made Seth feel sick, like it was evidence that all they’d been doing these past months was holding onto something doomed, even though it _wasn’t._ It was just evidence that they were both really fucking tired. 

As quietly as he could, he yanked Richie further onto the bed. It wasn’t a very quiet or smooth effort despite his intentions, but Richie didn’t wake up anyways, so he wrote it off as close enough. 

He told himself that he didn’t move to the other bed because he didn’t feel like giving up his warm spot on the bed, not because of any sentimental reason. 

~*~*~*~

By the next day, Richie’s hand still hadn’t healed. 

Which was actually kind of gross, because while they’d slept, it had oozed all over the ugly duvet, and by the time Seth woke up it had soaked straight through to the mattress. 

Honestly, it was far from the worst thing he’d ever done to a motel mattress, and he was sure that the staff had seen worse themselves, but it still made him feel like shit. Add one more thing to the list of things he’d screwed up.

“Guess there was something on the stake,” he said once he’d woken Richie up. “Either that or you finally got your rag.” 

Richie, grayish and looking like if he tried to stand up he’d either puke or take a nosedive onto the circa 1975 carpeting in the room, said, “Maybe we should just cut it off.”

“Richard, do not start with that.” 

“Well, do you have a better idea?” 

Seth gave up trying to scrub the bloodstain out of the mattress and just clumped up the blankets and pillows so that they covered it. He turned to Richie, who was looking at him with the most obnoxious expression, that bullshit face that said he knew he was full of shit but he also knew Seth didn’t have a good answer, not because Seth was in the wrong, but because no good answer existed, thereby giving himself an easy win. Seth was in no fucking mood. 

“Let me see,” Seth said. 

Richie relinquished his hand, albeit suspiciously. 

He made a show of examining the now-grody bandages—which were soaked not just in blood, but in what appeared to be lymph and maybe pus—then nodded thoughtfully and pulled a knife out of his duffel bag. “You’re right,” Seth said. “It’s gotta come off.” 

Richie snatched his hand back. 

“Oh, come on,” Seth called as Richie, holding onto the wall with his good hand, slowly made his way to the bathroom to re-clean the wound. “It worked out pretty well for Bruce Campbell, didn’t it?” 

Feeding made the blood clot up, but it turned out to only be for so long. It would start to scab over, only to start oozing again a few days later when he’d burned through his last meal. If they’d found some routine before, some measure of stability, it had all flown out the window. Richie was weird again, zoning out as often as he had when he was apparently starving to death even though he shouldn’t have been, sometimes losing track of what a conversation had been about even when they were just shooting the shit over a topic so well-tread that either of them could carry it on in their sleep. 

He slept too much, too, dozing most of the drive from one motel to the next, and and cocooning himself on the bed as soon as they walked into their room. 

So apart from slowly going nuts from the stress, Seth was also annoyed that he was having to do all the driving. Typical, really. 

~*~*~*~

He’d been worried about it for months, the fear nestled cold and insistent in the back of his mind, but it still somehow came as a shock when, while they were in a convenience store, Richie leaned across the counter and ripped the clerk’s throat out with his teeth.

He tried to pull him off the guy, but Richie just elbowed him in the sternum and sent him flying into a display of chips. He sat there in an orgy of processed food, trying to catch his breath and pick himself up, watching the scene unfold with dizzying clarity. 

Richie dropped the guy and turned and… 

The thing was, he didn’t even look guilty. He looked cognizant of what the emotional fallout was going to be like, of the fact that Seth was going to be pissed at him, but he didn’t look like he really felt bad about it. 

Richie tried to haul Seth to his feet, but Seth batted his hands away and levered himself up using a shelf of contraceptives and sleeping aids. 

They got into the car and drove. The convenience store was in the middle of nowhere, so they figured that they’d be okay if they just drove for a couple of solid days. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d slept in the car, and they had enough emergency blankets in the trunk that they could keep Richie from crisping up when they stopped for the day. 

Seth thought nastily to himself that they probably wouldn’t even have to bother, though; Richie’d had so much blood from the convenience store clerk that he probably wouldn’t burn up even if he was tied up in a field somewhere.

He couldn’t help but think that it was his fault somehow. He’d _known_ from day one that something wasn’t right with Richie. It had just been easy to let himself think that because Richie had looked normal—not covered in dirt or animal guts, and with no trace on his face of the “honest-to-god batshit Grizzly Adams beard” that Vanessa kept telling him about whenever she’d visited—then everything was cool, but after a certain point you had to accept that things had gone way off the deep end. 

Even from the beginning, he should have known. The fire had followed them around even though they switched schools after going to live with Uncle Eddie. It didn’t even take a week before they started hearing people whispering about it and telling each other what they thought really happened. It was subtle at first, but the whispers got louder and louder, until finally people stopped pretending they weren’t talking about them the second they walked by. 

One day he’d caught some douchebag saying, “I heard the creepy one set their dad on fire.”

Seth had split his knuckles open on the little douche’s face and he’d still felt sick afterwards.

He felt he’d adjusted well enough, all things considered. Started making friends, stopped hearing the whispers so much. But people seemed to just find Richie off-putting, which seemed to suit him well enough, because he never complained about it or even seemed bothered by it. 

Once, in high school, the two of them had been smoking behind the gym, and some asshole had gotten up in Richie’s face about some project he’d fucked up, all ‘freak’ this and ‘sack of shit’ that, and it had made Seth pissed enough that he was about to deck the guy himself, but something about Richie’s expression made him stay put. Richie was wearing a vague, cold smile that didn’t at all reach his eyes, and he didn’t so much as shift uncomfortably even though the asshole was close enough that the occasional fleck of spit loosed by his tirade landed on Richie’s face. 

Richie listened until the asshole stopped ranting and asked him if he was slow or something. Then he took a contemplative drag of his cigarette and put it out on the asshole’s face. The two of them got hauled in before the principal (Seth had skipped class to lurk anxiously outside the principal’s office) and Asshole actually told him that he’d put out the cigarette on his own face, that Richie wasn’t involved at all. That’s how creeped out he was.

They’d walked a fine line their whole lives, but somehow it hadn’t occurred to him that while he was still carefully teetering across it, Riche had long since stepped over it. 

Thinking like that made him feel like the biggest asshole in the world. He kept thinking to himself that Richie probably mostly went off his rocker because Seth was Dad’s favorite punching bag, and that if Richie had been the punching bag instead, things might have gone different. He could understand that. If he had to watch Richie get the shit kicked out of him every day, he might have gone a little weird too, gone a little bit off his rocker. 

And then he felt like shit for that too, for making excuses for him and, deep in the back of his mind, for thinking that if their places had been switched, maybe he wouldn’t have been able to hurt Dad to save Richie. 

~*~*~*~

He went out to get dinner after they got settled in their most recent room, and when he got back, Richie was asleep on the bed like a drunk; fully dressed, on top of the covers, lying on his stomach with his head turned to the side. Even from the doorway, Seth could see that there were still faint traces of dried blood around his mouth and splattered on his shoes, which hung off the end of the bed and dully reflected what little light seeped into the room through the ugly printed curtains. 

It’d been a whole day. You’d think he could at least clean himself up after killing a guy.

Seth just stood in the doorway, a bag of rapidly cooling fast food in one hand and a sweating cup of horchata in the other, his gun feeling as though it was burning a hole right through his clothes. 

Couldn’t control himself, right? Just like he couldn’t control himself in the bank, in the liquor store, in the motel.

He could have dealt with pretty much anything but this. The Richie from when they were kids was weird but he wasn’t a fucking murderer, and even the Richie from the heist would have been manageable if he hadn’t let him go into the stupid bar, if he’d just cold clocked him and dragged him out the minute he started getting bad vibes about the place. This Richie? The one who was literally a monster straight out of a B-movie, who never talked to him anymore, who could kill and eat people like it was nothing? He didn’t know how to deal with that Richie.

He was still his brother, but Dad had been Richie’s dad too, hadn’t he?

His stomach was roiling at the mere thought of contemplating what he was contemplating contemplating. How the hell did his life get to the point where he was thinking about what his wishes would be if he got turned into a blood-sucking monster, about whether or not Richie’s wishes would be the same? About whether or not their wishes, whatever they might be, would matter, morally speaking. He knew the answer already, was the thing. Because if it were him, he’d want Richie to stake the shit out of him. No matter what that bitch’s venom did to his brain, he wouldn’t want to live like that. But Richie… 

Back in the labyrinth, he’d said he didn’t know him anymore. He meant it and he didn’t. 

He’d feel better about it all if they had time to just exist for awhile. Somewhere safe and stable where they could hole up and talk it out and just try to excise some of the years’ worth of rot that had built up on their relationship. Because part of the problem was that him and Richie and peace had never gotten along. They were best friends when they were sneaking past Dad or robbing banks, but give them a few weeks’ respite and they were at each other’s throats. God knows they loved each other, but together they were a damn force of nature, and that kind of power just wasn’t sustainable or survivable if it wasn’t aimed directly at something. Without an outlet, they burnt out, got irritable and sick of each other. 

But they weren’t talking about it and they didn’t have stable or safe. They had the road, and cheap hotel rooms, and fast food wrappers in the backseat of the car, and blood on Richie’s shirt, and half-healed cuts on Seth’s arms. 

Seth set the horchata on the nightstand and flopped onto the bed heavily enough that Richie startled awake. 

~*~*~*~

Increasingly often, he woke up to find Richie already awake. It wouldn’t have bothered him even a year before, because Richie’s sleeping patterns had always been somewhat erratic—ranging from four to fourteen hours a night depending on the season, his mood, his health, and the price of a black market kidney transplant in Canada—but ever since he’d been vamped and especially since the weather had begun turning colder and colder, it’d been predictable. He either slept heavily or not at all, so it wasn’t like him to get up in the middle of the day. 

Richie claimed he’d been having dreams. 

When Seth pointed out that dreams that kept you up at night were usually classified as nightmares, Richie had frozen him out. 

That was that for weeks, until one day he found himself shaken roughly awake at noon, Richie’s face way too close for comfort. 

“We need to go,” Richie said. 

“You know it’s noon, right? You’ll burn to a crisp.” 

“We still need to. Something’s going to happen.” 

Seth’s instinct was to just tell him to go back to sleep, to assume that the guy was just drifting away from reality a bit and confusing his nightmares with the real world. It could happen to anyone, and if it was going to happen to anyone it seemed natural that it’d be to a recently-undead bank robber with a shitty childhood, a fraught relationship with his brother, a shiny new case of insomnia, and a predilection for setting people on fire. 

And that was exactly what he ended up doing, but Richie just kept waking him up, until finally he seemed to lose patience and just dragged him out of bed and shoved a cold mug of coffee at him while packing their shit up at breakneck speed. 

“Why are we leaving, exactly?” Seth said, dutifully drinking the crappy coffee. Never let it be said he never did anything for Richie. 

“I told you,” Richie said. “Something’s going to happen.”

“I need you to give me something to work with, here.” 

Richie zipped up a bag more passive aggressively than seemed necessary and stood still for a moment, jaw tight. Finally he said, “I had a dream, okay? You burned to death.” 

“Yeah, I have that nightmare a lot, too. Hasn’t happened yet.”

“ _Seth._ ”

Seth scrubbed a hand over his face. “Okay. What the hell. I could use some vitamin D anyways.” 

It was weird driving without Richie riding shotgun. Not to mention kind of goofy-looking that he’d fallen asleep in the backseat with a tarp thrown over him.

After awhile it was kind of nice. Soothing. He stopped at a food truck for lunch and ate sitting on the hood of the car, and for the half hour or so it took to eat it he thought about nothing at all. No Richie staring at him like he was trying to eat vicariously through him, no fluorescent lightbulb glaring through an ugly hotel lampshade, no rattle of a dying heater, no muffled shouts through thin walls. Just hot food, and crisp air, and the quiet sounds of living breathing people cooking and ordering food, and the slightly sun-warmed surface of the car. And the sun itself, naturally. 

That part kind of fucking sucked. It’d been way too easy to get used to a nocturnal schedule, to convince himself that it wasn’t a big deal. Nothing was forcing him to sleep the day away; he always had the option of getting up and going for a walk. Or getting up and just leaving and taking his chances alone. But even thinking about that felt like a betrayal, like abandonment, and even though he knew it was a bullshit line of thinking he couldn’t shake it off. 

They drove two days like that, until finally Richie, looking ill again, a pinkish mixture of blood and lymph seeping through the bandages on his hand, said it was safe to stop. 

When Seth flipped on the TV in the motel room they ended up in, there were reports of a fire in their last motel. They hadn’t ruled out arson. 

“Before you ask,” Richie said from where he was hoarding all the blankets in the room, “I don’t know any more than you do.” 

But Richie didn’t seem to sleep any better, and Seth started sleeping lighter himself, always wondering if he’d be shaken awake again at midday. 

~*~*~*~

Mostly his own nightmares were about Abilene and the day that followed, but sometimes he had the birthday dream again: the blood dripping heavily onto Richie’s glasses, tiny droplets spraying onto the cake and coloring the cloying frosting that had no real right to call itself cream cheese. Sometimes the room was dark except for the faint light of the birthday candle, and as it grew dimmer and dimmer he caught only glimpses of the now-familiar scene. Some nights the light caught the blood dampening Richie’s hair, and sometimes he could see it starting to congeal under Richie’s fingernails. The worst was when it cast flickering shadows over their faces, alternately casting them in sharp relief and rendering them blurred and unrecognizable.

He could always smell the lighter fluid, though. 

Less frequent were the ones where he dreamed that he’d awakened from a nightmare to find Richie asleep next to him with his face pressed into his neck, and the gesture shouldn’t have felt threatening but in the dream he was horribly aware of the feeling of Richie’s teeth behind his lips—was aware, in fact, of little else—and paralyzed by the knowledge of just how screwed he’d be if Richie started having the snake equivalent of those dreams dogs have where they’re chasing rabbits. If he didn’t wake up soon enough, Richie’s teeth changed and the pressure of them against his carotid became more insistent. He hadn’t yet failed to wake up at that point, pawing at his own neck with sleep-stiffened fingers to be sure of its safety, but it didn’t take a prodigy to guess where the dream was going. 

Once, after one of the last type, he rolled right off the edge of the bed in his hazy, half-asleep panic that Richie was about to take a chunk out of his neck. His gun was in his hand before he was awake enough to stop himself. Nothing happened—and nothing was going to happen because Richie was his brother and he’d pulled him out of the fire and he _couldn’t_ —but Richie had woken up just in time to see Seth level the gun at him. 

They looked at each other for a long moment, Seth’s palm sweating against the gun, Richie looking unblinkingly past the barrel to meet Seth’s eyes. His hair and clothes were sleep-rumpled but there was nothing groggy about his expression—and at the same time, nothing angry or frightened either. No judgement, just an audience. 

_Just put the gun down,_ Seth told himself. It was just a stupid dream. Nothing to get worked up over. All that happened was that he adjusted his grip on it, feeling like his hands were so clammy that his fingers would slip anyways. His arms were shaking. 

By the time he was able to lower the gun, an eternity seemed to have passed. The overly-easy neutrality in Richie’s eyes flickered and was replaced by a more bleary, human expression. He asked if Seth was going back to sleep, as if nothing had happened, as if Seth had just gotten up to take a leak, and it was all Seth could do to shake his head and get to his feet.

Seth had gone on a breakfast run, and Richie had stolen Seth’s warm spot on the bed, and neither of them had said anything about it. 

~*~*~*~

There were a lot of things they never talked about.

Maybe Richie had already crossed the line. But there were lines Seth wasn’t willing to cross, not yet. And maybe one day Richie _would_ go past the point of no return, go one step further than Seth was willing to follow.

But it hadn’t happened yet.


End file.
